was in a literal sense to live with the enemy within.” If, in Peele’s film, “to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved,” “Get Out” portrays biracial identity as a state of existence in which the oppression is internalized, an internal oppressor forever violating an internal oppressed, the two mixed up in an endless grip of violence and desire. They are also metaphors for the biracial American experience itself, with its long history of rape: “To be biracial in America. The film’s black victims, Smith hints chillingly, are not just metaphors for the sort of cultural appropriation of which Schutz stands accused.

What has this to do with Peele’s horror-comedy, in which black characters are lobotomized and inhabited by white parasites who control them from the inside? As Smith points out in another essay, Peele is biracial too, and by juxtaposing “Get Out” with “Open Casket,” she reads a level of anxiety about being biracial into the film that few of its overwhelmingly enthusiastic critics have noticed. Now married to a white poet, she stands in the gallery with her white-skinned, green-eyed children, wondering whether they will be considered “black enough” to create art about black pain.

As a novelist, she has been writing about cross-cultural encounters for 20 years, since she sold her precocious debut “White Teeth” to best-selling acclaim as a 19-year-old Cambridge undergraduate.

Smith is the biracial daughter of a black Jamaican mother and white British father, raised in the council flats of multicultural London. Her real answer, though, comes in an intense moment of intimacy and identification as she stands before the painting itself. Taking at face value writer and performance artist Hannah Black’s open letter to the Whitney, co-signed by dozens of black artists, urging that the painting be removed from the Whitney Biennial “with the urgent recommendation that (it) be destroyed,” Smith dutifully points out that to destroy art is “the province of Nazis and censorious evangelicals.” The painting under consideration in “Getting Out and In” is an abstract portrait of Emmett Till’s ravaged corpse the question at hand is whether a white woman had any right to paint it. It’s the kind of essay that sheds light on a whole career, and it would justify this collection even if “Feel Free” didn’t include a handful of more perfectly crafted pieces of prose. Not since her 2008 polemic “Two Paths for the Novel” has anything Smith has written caused such reverberations. At the beating heart of Zadie Smith’s latest collection, “Feel Free,” an eclectic mix of book reviews, celebrity profiles, awards speeches and long-form philosophical musings, is an essay called “Getting Out and In.” A consideration of Jordan Peele’s debut feature film “Get Out” alongside the controversial Dana Schutz painting “Open Casket,” the essay drew praise and ire in equal measure when it was first published in Harper’s Magazine last July.

Feel free zadie